Intro Post (Finally!)
OK, For my new friends here's a bit about me.
I started on Livejournal in October of 2003. I was forced over here at knife point by one of my oldest friends, Rensong. She may deny the knife, but I clearly remember it, all long and pointy and cold. *nod* In the last ten years a lot has happened, as I suppose you might expect between the ages of 18 and 28.
But before I get into all that I guess I should actually back up a little further than 2003 for a moment...
This sorta got long... I'll break it up into sections for you to read at your pleasure.
I in the past 15 years I have moved around a LOT. I still claim Minnesota as my "home state" but only because I've lived there longer than I've lived anywhere else, though Tennessee is going to surpass that before too much longer. Kindergarten through 8th grade we lived in a medium sized town in the middle of Minnesota not near anything. Then in 1998 the moving started. We left the middle of Minnesota for the middle of Wisconsin where I met Rensong through a combination of church and highschool. Partway through 9th grade we moved to Iowa where I finished 9th and 10th grade. After that we went to Washington state where I finished 11th and 12th grades. After attending 3 highschools I really didn't give a damn about school anymore, so I wasn't about to go to college. My options were to continue living with my mother and work at Walmart or to join the Army. Since living with my mother really wasn't an option (read some of those early posts... it was not a good combination of teenaged surliness and OCD mother) I decided that I had a future in the military. After aceing the military's language aptitude test (I had the highest score the recruters had ever seen) I signed up to be a translator. There was a breif (and miserable, see above comments about mom) stop in Texas as I was waiting to leave for boot camp.
I did bootcamp in Missori and then shipped out to Monterey California to attend the Defence Language Institute where I discovered that dyslexia and sandscrit (Arabic) do NOT mix well. I failed out of my class after 4 months. I was then placed as "Needs of the Army" and wound up being assigned to Air Traffic Control. I left the beautiful cost of California to go to the peanut fields of southern Alabama. I graduated from ATC school and then was lucky enough to get orders to Germany. We (more on "we" in a moment) were there for 3 years when I decided that there was too much time away from family and left the Army and came to Tennessee where I'm still at now, it will be 6 years in August.
Just a quick rundown, from 1998 to 2013 I've lived in:
Minnesota
Wisconsin
Iowa
Washington (state)
Texas
Missouri
California
Alabama
Germany
Tennesee
During all that insanity I met my husband. We first started talking in an internet chatroom when I was living in Washington and he was living in Tennessee back in 2002. We hit it off, eventually exchanged MSN messenger addresses (cause that's what you did in the early naught's) and later on exchanged phone numbers. We were in daily communication with eachother for 7 months before he came out to visit me for the first time. I was already in love with him at that point, though I was trying to deny it for fear of getting hurt. I was 18 and he was 19 and we were going to do a long distance relationship? Odds were certainly against us.
Anywho, that first trip began a series of us getting together as much as our unemployed teenager budgets could afford.
In 2004 he packed up all his belongings in the back of his pickup truck and did a cross country journy to come out and live near me in California which is where we wound up getting married down on the beach. He followed behind me to Alabama (I left 2 weeks after our wedding) and then we eventually got him out to Germany (another 3 months trying to get paperwork right). Meanwhile, I actually got pregnant while I was in Alabama though I didn't realize that I was pregnant until I made it out to Germany. Talk about a stressful trans-atlantic phone call "Hey babe, I know we've never lived together and we've only been married 6 months but guess what! I'm Pregnant!" Our oldest daughter Alta (all-tah) was born in Germany and, poor kid, cannot be the President of the United States because she's just a naturalized citizen of our fair nation.
Our second daughter Lilly, was actually how I got out of the Army. They were just ramping up the "Surge" in Iraq and 3 months before we were going to deploy it was anounced that all active duty army was being involuntarily extended from 12 month deployments to 15 month deployments. Due to the time of year we were leaving that would have ment I was going to miss our 3rd and 4th wedding aniversarys, Alta's 2nd and 3rd birthdays, as well as 2 christmases. It was just too much and I told Joe that we had 3 months to get pregnant, if it worked great, if not, no harm I'd go as planned. Apparently God was on my side of things because within the first month I was pregnant. I left the Army and headed back to the States. Breif side note - don't bother complaining to me about flying with a toddler... I managed a 2 hour commuter flight, a layover/flight change straight into a 12 hour trans-atlantic flight by myself with an 19 month old while I was 5 months pregnant, I win the argument. :-P lol!
We staid with Joe's parents for longer than we meant to but eventually bought our little house about 35 miles south of where they lived. I now complain all the time about said little house. It's a 3 bedroom, 2 bath ranch style on a big lot with a fenced in back yard, but it's only 1300 square feet, 300 of which is only semi usable due to it being a poorly insulated garage-to-room redo at somepoint in the past. With 5 of us in the house now (Maddie was born while we've lived down here) we're all up in eachother's business. Plus it has a terrible kitchen, both Joe and I cook a lot so having literally (I measured it once) 37" of usable counterspace is a nightmare.
ummm... ok So the kids are now 7, 5, and 2. Alta just finished 1st grade and is struggling with (as of yet) undiagnosed dyslexia. I know she has it, Joe knows she has it, even her 1st grade teacher eventually came around and admitted she has it, but the school refuses to do any testing until she's in 3rd grade, which is bullshit but there ya have it. We were advised to take her to a dyslexia center partway through second grade if she's still haveing trouble, do the testing on our own dime, and then bring the results to the school. I see that happening.
Lilly starts Kindergarten this year, she is both excited and terrified. I think she's actually most terrified of the dreaded "Kindergarten shots" which I need to make an appointment to get done here pretty soon, schools starts up the begining of August. She is a very smart kid and drives Joe and I crazy with her never-ending chatter and questions. For example: on the way to church on Sunday, completely out of left field, she asked "Do dolphins have blow-holes? Is that how they breathe?" Yes they do and yes it is, but where on earth did that come from??
Maddie is a sweet heart. I'm a little too lenient on her because I'm not quite ready to loose my baby, but she is getting a little out of control. Dicipline is in her near future. Also potty training, but that's a different topic. I'll probably wait till the big-girls are in school before tackling that project.
After the Army I worked a few odd jobs here and there while Joe went to our local community college and got his nursing degree. After he gradutated I went to school on my GI bill and got a General Transfer AS because it seemed like the right thing to do. I graduated Magna Cum last December and now put my degree to good use as a dust colleter while I'm a stay at home mom. I love being home with my girls, even if it is long days with no time off. :-)
Joe was, until recently, Assistant Director of Nursing at a Long Term Care center (the new PC way to say Nursing Home). The Director of Nursing got some sort of stick up her ass about something and sent him on his way though. The center Administrator stood up for Joe as best he could and arranged for him to get an interview at another center with the same company here in town as a floor nurse again. Joe wrangled 5 weeks of vacation at his old, higher, pay rate and just started his new job on Monday. He'll be working nights, which sucks, but you go where the job is. He really wants to get into a hospital and out of long term care, but hasn't had any luck with his interviews yet. Hopefully soon. Meanwhile, he's going to start back to college this fall to get his Nursing BS degree which will open a lot more doors for us.
I started on Livejournal in October of 2003. I was forced over here at knife point by one of my oldest friends, Rensong. She may deny the knife, but I clearly remember it, all long and pointy and cold. *nod* In the last ten years a lot has happened, as I suppose you might expect between the ages of 18 and 28.
But before I get into all that I guess I should actually back up a little further than 2003 for a moment...
This sorta got long... I'll break it up into sections for you to read at your pleasure.
I in the past 15 years I have moved around a LOT. I still claim Minnesota as my "home state" but only because I've lived there longer than I've lived anywhere else, though Tennessee is going to surpass that before too much longer. Kindergarten through 8th grade we lived in a medium sized town in the middle of Minnesota not near anything. Then in 1998 the moving started. We left the middle of Minnesota for the middle of Wisconsin where I met Rensong through a combination of church and highschool. Partway through 9th grade we moved to Iowa where I finished 9th and 10th grade. After that we went to Washington state where I finished 11th and 12th grades. After attending 3 highschools I really didn't give a damn about school anymore, so I wasn't about to go to college. My options were to continue living with my mother and work at Walmart or to join the Army. Since living with my mother really wasn't an option (read some of those early posts... it was not a good combination of teenaged surliness and OCD mother) I decided that I had a future in the military. After aceing the military's language aptitude test (I had the highest score the recruters had ever seen) I signed up to be a translator. There was a breif (and miserable, see above comments about mom) stop in Texas as I was waiting to leave for boot camp.
I did bootcamp in Missori and then shipped out to Monterey California to attend the Defence Language Institute where I discovered that dyslexia and sandscrit (Arabic) do NOT mix well. I failed out of my class after 4 months. I was then placed as "Needs of the Army" and wound up being assigned to Air Traffic Control. I left the beautiful cost of California to go to the peanut fields of southern Alabama. I graduated from ATC school and then was lucky enough to get orders to Germany. We (more on "we" in a moment) were there for 3 years when I decided that there was too much time away from family and left the Army and came to Tennessee where I'm still at now, it will be 6 years in August.
Just a quick rundown, from 1998 to 2013 I've lived in:
Minnesota
Wisconsin
Iowa
Washington (state)
Texas
Missouri
California
Alabama
Germany
Tennesee
During all that insanity I met my husband. We first started talking in an internet chatroom when I was living in Washington and he was living in Tennessee back in 2002. We hit it off, eventually exchanged MSN messenger addresses (cause that's what you did in the early naught's) and later on exchanged phone numbers. We were in daily communication with eachother for 7 months before he came out to visit me for the first time. I was already in love with him at that point, though I was trying to deny it for fear of getting hurt. I was 18 and he was 19 and we were going to do a long distance relationship? Odds were certainly against us.
Anywho, that first trip began a series of us getting together as much as our unemployed teenager budgets could afford.
In 2004 he packed up all his belongings in the back of his pickup truck and did a cross country journy to come out and live near me in California which is where we wound up getting married down on the beach. He followed behind me to Alabama (I left 2 weeks after our wedding) and then we eventually got him out to Germany (another 3 months trying to get paperwork right). Meanwhile, I actually got pregnant while I was in Alabama though I didn't realize that I was pregnant until I made it out to Germany. Talk about a stressful trans-atlantic phone call "Hey babe, I know we've never lived together and we've only been married 6 months but guess what! I'm Pregnant!" Our oldest daughter Alta (all-tah) was born in Germany and, poor kid, cannot be the President of the United States because she's just a naturalized citizen of our fair nation.
Our second daughter Lilly, was actually how I got out of the Army. They were just ramping up the "Surge" in Iraq and 3 months before we were going to deploy it was anounced that all active duty army was being involuntarily extended from 12 month deployments to 15 month deployments. Due to the time of year we were leaving that would have ment I was going to miss our 3rd and 4th wedding aniversarys, Alta's 2nd and 3rd birthdays, as well as 2 christmases. It was just too much and I told Joe that we had 3 months to get pregnant, if it worked great, if not, no harm I'd go as planned. Apparently God was on my side of things because within the first month I was pregnant. I left the Army and headed back to the States. Breif side note - don't bother complaining to me about flying with a toddler... I managed a 2 hour commuter flight, a layover/flight change straight into a 12 hour trans-atlantic flight by myself with an 19 month old while I was 5 months pregnant, I win the argument. :-P lol!
We staid with Joe's parents for longer than we meant to but eventually bought our little house about 35 miles south of where they lived. I now complain all the time about said little house. It's a 3 bedroom, 2 bath ranch style on a big lot with a fenced in back yard, but it's only 1300 square feet, 300 of which is only semi usable due to it being a poorly insulated garage-to-room redo at somepoint in the past. With 5 of us in the house now (Maddie was born while we've lived down here) we're all up in eachother's business. Plus it has a terrible kitchen, both Joe and I cook a lot so having literally (I measured it once) 37" of usable counterspace is a nightmare.
ummm... ok So the kids are now 7, 5, and 2. Alta just finished 1st grade and is struggling with (as of yet) undiagnosed dyslexia. I know she has it, Joe knows she has it, even her 1st grade teacher eventually came around and admitted she has it, but the school refuses to do any testing until she's in 3rd grade, which is bullshit but there ya have it. We were advised to take her to a dyslexia center partway through second grade if she's still haveing trouble, do the testing on our own dime, and then bring the results to the school. I see that happening.
Lilly starts Kindergarten this year, she is both excited and terrified. I think she's actually most terrified of the dreaded "Kindergarten shots" which I need to make an appointment to get done here pretty soon, schools starts up the begining of August. She is a very smart kid and drives Joe and I crazy with her never-ending chatter and questions. For example: on the way to church on Sunday, completely out of left field, she asked "Do dolphins have blow-holes? Is that how they breathe?" Yes they do and yes it is, but where on earth did that come from??
Maddie is a sweet heart. I'm a little too lenient on her because I'm not quite ready to loose my baby, but she is getting a little out of control. Dicipline is in her near future. Also potty training, but that's a different topic. I'll probably wait till the big-girls are in school before tackling that project.
After the Army I worked a few odd jobs here and there while Joe went to our local community college and got his nursing degree. After he gradutated I went to school on my GI bill and got a General Transfer AS because it seemed like the right thing to do. I graduated Magna Cum last December and now put my degree to good use as a dust colleter while I'm a stay at home mom. I love being home with my girls, even if it is long days with no time off. :-)
Joe was, until recently, Assistant Director of Nursing at a Long Term Care center (the new PC way to say Nursing Home). The Director of Nursing got some sort of stick up her ass about something and sent him on his way though. The center Administrator stood up for Joe as best he could and arranged for him to get an interview at another center with the same company here in town as a floor nurse again. Joe wrangled 5 weeks of vacation at his old, higher, pay rate and just started his new job on Monday. He'll be working nights, which sucks, but you go where the job is. He really wants to get into a hospital and out of long term care, but hasn't had any luck with his interviews yet. Hopefully soon. Meanwhile, he's going to start back to college this fall to get his Nursing BS degree which will open a lot more doors for us.